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THE BIBLE IN CHINESE / A LITTLE HISTORYWENLI VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPTURESThe first translations of the Bible into Chinese were in Wenli, the literary language of China. Chinese ideograms are read differently in each of the Chinese languages and dialects (much as, for example, Arabic numerals are “read” differently in the various European languages); but Wenli functioned as a common idiom for them all. Only a relatively small percentage of the population actually mastered this literary langu …